Rarely discussed, often implicitly denied by discussions framed in terms of the Japanese government's pushing nuclear restarts, but obviously very significant: that government's fossil fuel revenue windfall.

How much is it? It has to be billions per year, because natural gas to replace the output of 48 shut-down nuclear power reactors, at the prices Japan has been paying, has to cost $50 billion a year, and governments typically take an eighth.

How important is it to that government and its friendly papers? Well, one promotes one's gas take better when one never *mentions* one's gas take, and they never do. And there have been polls that offered citizens the choice of five headings under which to be counted, with respect to nuclear power: it should be “stopped immediately,” “stopped before 2030,” “stopped in the 2030s,” “stopped after the 2030s,” and “continued without being stopped.”

Although only two reactors were in service when the poll was taken, citizens wanting the other 48 that could be in service to be returned to it had no way to represent themselves.

This seemed to me like a transparent attempt to represent Japanese public opinion as anti-nuclear-power despite a suspicion on the poll-takers' part that it is pro-nuclear-power.

The elections results are polls of a kind they haven't been able to fix.

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Japan Real Time is a newsy, concise guide to what works, what doesn’t and why in the one-time poster child for Asian development, as it struggles to keep pace with faster-growing neighbors while competing with Europe for Michelin-rated restaurants. Drawing on the expertise of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, the site provides an inside track on business, politics and lifestyle in Japan as it comes to terms with being overtaken by China as the world’s second-biggest economy. You can contact the editors at japanrealtime@wsj.com